low carbon energy and engineering

six degrees of separation

In the Dorset woods last summer, I spent a day learning to make fire with a bow drill, starting with just a knife and a log. There were eight of us on this bushcraft course, each one tasked with making his own fire from scratch. We all worked in a charged silence and then eventually someone would get a fire going and he’d howl and hoot and punch the air. The others would look up enviously for a moment and then bend back down to their own bow drills.

In the evening around the campfire we talked about the lesson and some of the guys agreed that making fire was more satisfying that most things they’d accomplished in their professional lives. Fire is the foundation of civilisation – you could argue that fire defines humanity. We’re human, we’re more or less civilised, so making fire should be easy. But it isn’t – because it’s too simple.

By its nature, a complex society requires specialists. Most of us in Europe and the US have jobs that fill a tiny niche, jobs that would be useless in a simpler society; meanwhile our needs stay the same regardless of the complexity of the society we live in. Because of our specialisation, we often lack even the basic generalist skills that are needed to satisfy those needs. Instead, we specialists are reliant on other specialists (themselves reliant and yet other specialists), each of us operating many layers of abstraction away from the processes by which our needs are met.

Complexity comes at a cost. Only with a ready supply of cheap energy can we afford to have so many people who, instead of working directly on production of food or other essential items, are occupied with management – mostly management of information. Only with cheap energy can so many people have meta-jobs, well-paid, but that produce almost nothing. Jobs aimed mostly at keeping the machine moving.

If cheap energy becomes less abundant, it’s no longer possible to sustain the same level of complexity. A complex society breaks into smaller, simpler units because there are no longer the resources to support people not involved in production. Specialists are replaced by generalists and a larger proportion of work is necessarily focused on satisfying basic needs.

It’s all so hypothetical, this discussion about satisfying our own needs, and it’s a subject we rarely think about. Of course we’ll always have access to the energy, goods, and services that allow us not to think. But using a bow drill gives you a glimpse of what you take for granted.

Only assuming the life raft has a PC with a GPS transmitter- otherwise the bugger goes first. Fishermen and sailmakers last!

Very insightful though, Case and all very true. Sadly a lot of the specialist skills on a microeconomic (a village, say) level are already 2 generations removed from practice. Luckily, enough people who care are willing to teach the rest of us how to use a bow drill and shoe a horse, weave cloth etc.

I did a weekend like that as well, one of the most gratyfying experinces I can remember, although a n hour trying to get a bow drill working well left me with one arm like popeye and the other about an inch shorter!

Similarly, I think learning to make twine from nettle fiber or handspinning wool with a drop spindle was very satisfying…altho it would take me a mighty long time to make a fishing net or rabbit net from nettle fiber…I’d starve to death in the meantime (maybe not, but I’d certainly be very hungry). Indigenous people in the past were brilliant in their uses of available resources. A great book is “Native American Ethnobotany” by Daniel Moerman (Timber Press 1998) . If complex society collapses, I want that book by my side. What happens to a complex society’s culture when it breaks into smaller units…isn’t it the producers of intangible things who perpetuate the culture? Hmmmm, have to think about that….hunting/gathering people had culture, maybe it was simpler as well.

Once we were able to produce more than enough food for our own use, we branched off into specialty areas and left the subsistence idea behind. The cost for that is the separation from the basic and the niche specialization that you mention here. While it is good to pay homage to the simpler time, going back for a civilization is not an option, at least not in this lifetime (barring some unreal catastrophe, instead we may go with a whimper and not a bang).

Subsistence left little time for self fulfillment, except for the self satisfaction one may have gotten from starting their own fire. We have moved beyond that now and the momentum builds toward a possible cliff.

The time to think and create something new is the gain from civilization and the cost is the detachment we feel from the overall environment.

John, I suspect that we are going to see a step back from complexity in Henry’s generation as oil production peaks and then drops. We just won’t be able to support the level of complexity we have at the moment. I’m not suggesting it’s a choice between current society and subsistence living. I think there’s a range in between, many of which leave time for thinking, art, and creativity. E.g. the Renaissance, Enlightenment, etc. and no tractors anywhere.

The choice comes in how we manage the inevitable move to a simpler structure. If we barrel straight on without managing the process then we may land with a thump. On the other hand if we manage the transition, particularly with regard to energy needs, we’ll get a softer landing (with more of our current advances intact).